Woodlands and abandoned cities burned
on the bank of rivers that roasted
stones and embankments,
bleeding gums
and teeth of buttery ash
like the distance that the golden-smoke azuacan
brings on its wings from southern lands.
Butterflies of turpentine
flew from the trunks of the pines.
Cataracts of orchid sweat
rained from the arms of the ceiba trees.
Fire dust fell from the dry oaks,
boiling balsam from the liquidambars
and to the perfume of tamarinds ablaze
was joined that of the cacao groves, a scent of chocolate,
amid the little bone cracks of the sapodillas ,
the rubber trees twisted in elastic columns,
the chicle trees dripping with milky hairs,
and the crackling conocastes ,
red blood of uprooted foliage,
and the sleeping white oaks ,
almost mineral,
and the fleshy mahoganies,
already butter from the touch of a constellation
that lost a foot in the conflagration of the sky
and now walked its leg of fire
in the conflagration of the land.

Whales gone astray in tropical seas,phosphorescent, torrid flying seas,playing vaqueros, they hurled jets of waterto lasso the tiger of the conflagration,the tiger of squeaking rubies,who recovered his comet-gone-mad ferocityas he fell on the crystal hoop strapsof the blue vaqueros,liquid lariats that held him,paralyzed with surprise,long enough to slow his escape,his flight from the water-made-steam,while the corsairs, floating islands with tiny eyes,managed to rope him with new and more powerfuljets of water, slip-knot rings,whose loops the tiger of squeaking rubiespulled up among flames and stars,toward the constellation of the mirage,the one that lost its foot, the constellation of distance,and toward the army of blue lakesparapeted in the mouths of the higher volcanoes,lakes that before falling into fragments –conquered, evaporated –leaptand, coiled on the tiger of rubies, galloped with him,transformed into serpents of turquoise flames.

The earth was subjected
to a punishment of profundities.
After the conflagration, the invisible rains,
the soil overturned, the hurricane of mud,
the razors of the sun,
the chichicaste nettle in the living flesh…
a punishment of profundities
for having made room
for the first barbarian, not the last,
for the first human beast,
for the first executioner
in my country forged of honey.

“I’m not the client,” the ferret seated across from me said. He was as thin as a garrote, with a library-paste complexion, the facial skin surrounding his veined-quartz eyes as papery as dried flowers. He was always room temperature. “You know me, Burke. I only work the middle.”

“I don’t know you,” I lied. “You knew—you say you knew—my brother. But if you did—”

“Yeah, I know he’s gone,” the ferret said, meeting my eyes, the way you do when you’ve got nothing to hide. With him, it was an invitation to search an empty room. “But you’ve got the same name, right? He never had any first name that I knew; so what would I call you, I meet you for the first time?”

It’s impossible to actually look into my eyes, because you have to do it one at a time. One eye is a lot lighter than the other, and they don’t track together anymore.

A few years ago, I was tricked into an ambush. The crossfire cost me my looks, and my partner her life. I mourn her every day—the hollow blue heart tattooed between the last two knuckles of my right hand is Pansy’s tombstone—but I don’t miss my face. True, it was a lot more anonymous than the one I’ve got now. Back then, I was a walking John Doe: average height, average weight — generic lineup filler. But a lot of different people had seen that face in a lot of different places. And the State had a lot of photographs of it, too—they don’t throw out old mug shots.

I’d come into the ER without a trace of ID, dropped at the door by the Prof and Clarence—they knew I was way past risking the do-it-yourself kit we kept around for gunshot wounds.

Since the government doesn’t pay the freight for cosmetic surgery on derelicts, the hospital went into financial triage, no extras. So the neat, round keloid scar on my right cheek is still there, and the top of my left ear is still as flat as if it had been snipped off. And when the student surgeons repaired the cheekbone on the right side of my face, they pulled the skin so tight that it looked like one of the bullets I took had been loaded with Botox. My once-black hair is steel-gray now—it turned that shade while I was in a coma from the slugs, and never went back.”

“Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. The three great tables that ran the length of the hall were laid already, the silver and the glass catching what little light there was, and the long benches were pulled out ready for the guests. Portraits of former Masters hung high up in the gloom along the walls. Lyra reached the dais and looked back at the open kitchen door, and, seeing no one, stepped up beside the high table. The places here were laid with gold, not silver, and the fourteen seats were not oak benches but mahogany chairs with velvet cushions.

Lyra stopped beside the Master’s chair and flicked the biggest glass gently with a fingernail. The sound rang clearly through the hall.

“You’re not taking this seriously,” whispered her daemon. “Behave yourself.”

Her daemon’s name was Pantalaimon, and he was currently in the form of a moth, a dark brown one so as not to show up in the darkness of the hall.

“They’re making too much noise to hear from the kitchen,” Lyra whispered back. “And the Steward doesn’t come in till the first bell. Stop fussing.”

But she put her palm over the ringing crystal anyway, and Pantalaimon fluttered ahead and through the slightly open door of the Retiring Room at the other end of the dais. After a moment he appeared again.

“There’s no one there,” he whispered. “But we must be quick.”

Crouching behind the high table, Lyra darted along and through the door into the Retiring Room, where she stood up and looked around. The only light in here came from the fireplace, where a bright blaze of logs settled slightly as she looked, sending a fountain of sparks up into the chimney. She had lived most of her life in the College, but had never seen the Retiring Room before: only Scholars and their guests were allowed in here, and never females. Even the maid-servants didn’t clean in here. That was the Butler’s job alone.”

“What I lack is rhythm”
The first known published work of Fannie Hurst appeared in her high school newspaper at Christmastime 1904, the month before she graduated. “An Episode,” a nine-paragraph story, sketches a few moments in
the life of a wealthy, powerful, but godless man alone with his conscience in a cathedral. Overcome by the haunting majesty of his surroundings, he watched his misdeeds pass before him. Pain and remorse engulfed him. He sat crouched alone on a pew until the last echoes of “Ave Maria” died away.
Then he rose, and went out, and as he went he said, “I have knowledge, I have power–what I lack is rhythm.”
Then he threw back his head and laughed, long and loud and bitterly, and went off into the dusk.
Fannie Hurst, the daughter of now quite comfortable, assimilated German Jews with deadening middle-class aspirations, wanted to be a writer. She liked to claim that the Saturday Evening Post mailed back her manuscripts as if by boomerang from the time she was fourteen. This did not deter her. Nor did her mother’s dire prediction that she would end up “an old-maid schoolteacher like Tillie Strauss,” the sad and lonely spinster daughter of one of her mother’s friends. Fannie defied this well-meant but suffocating opposition and compromised only enough to go to college in St. Louis, her hometown. She entered Washington University in the fall of 1905, a month before she turned twenty.
Fannie and her classmates watched much ground break. The handsome new Gothic-style “Quad” had been a site for the most defining seven months of the century for St. Louis, the “Universal Exposition,” more commonly known as the 1904 World’s Fair. The trees thatlined the campus drives were only saplings in those days, reminding Fannie of “the knees of newborn calves.”

In The Beginning Man Tried Ascending To Heaven via The Tower Of Babel. Now He Tries To Elevate His Existence Using Hallucinogenic Drugs. And, Since The 20th Century, He Continually Voyages Into Outer Space Using Spacecrafts. Prayer Thru Christ Is The Only Way To Reach Heaven.